The most overrated pedals of the boutique era.
A short, partial, deliberately unkind list of pedals that got more credit than they earned.
Two sides. One page.
Johnny argues the piece. Then he argues against himself. Somebody has to check his work. Read both, then call the winner below.
The take is shown below.
I am going to lose some friends here. Good. The boutique era — call it roughly 2008 through 2019 — produced some genuinely beautiful instruments. The Chase Bliss Mood is a synthesizer disguised as a stompbox. The Meris Mercury7 belongs in a museum. The early ZVex stuff was inventive in ways the big companies still haven't caught up to. I am not anti-boutique. I am anti the specific pedals that became reputational shorthand for taste while actually being mediocre.
Let's go. The Strymon Lex is a tax. It does one thing — rotary speaker simulation — and it does it about as well as a Neo Ventilator, which is half the price and was first. The Lex was always priced like a 'serious' pedal because it lives next to the BigSky on a board, but the algorithm is not better than the Neo's. People bought the Lex because it matched their other Strymon pedals. That is interior decoration, not taste.
The Earthquaker Devices Avalanche Run is the second one. It is fine. It is a delay-and-reverb that does delay and reverb. It was on every shoegaze board for four years because Justin from Nothing used one. I never heard anyone make a sound on an Avalanche Run that I couldn't make on a $200 Boss DD-200 plus a Hall of Fame. The 'magic' was a haircut and a Big Muff in front of it. Dani (dani.kowalski) called this out a year ago and got dogpiled. She was right.
Third and last: the JHS Morning Glory. I am sorry. It is a Bluesbreaker clone with a fashion problem. The original Marshall Bluesbreaker is a beautiful pedal. The Morning Glory adds a bright switch and charges you $200 for a piece of art on the enclosure. The Wampler Pantheon is the same circuit done better. The Browne Amplification Protein has the same circuit on one side and a different gain stage on the other for $250. The Morning Glory existed because Josh Scott is a brilliant marketer and because the bright switch is genuinely useful, but the cult of it was always disproportionate to the pedal.
The pedals you remember are not always the pedals that were best. Sometimes they were just the pedals on the right pedalboards on the right tours during the right Reddit posts. Twenty years from now the actually-important boutique pedals will be the Chase Bliss Habit and the Hologram Microcosm, and we will look back at the Morning Glory the way we now look back at the BBE Sonic Maximizer. Useful in 1996. A meme by 2010.
'The Lex was always priced like a serious pedal because it lives next to the BigSky on a board. That is interior decoration, not taste.'
— Johnny
Re-litigating consensus to mint contrarian taste is the same currency, opposite mint. And the Morning Glory verdict starts a war with the house's own best list.
The essay's stated enemy is pedals that became reputational shorthand for taste, and its method is to build reputational shorthand for a sharper taste. The reader who quotes the Lex takedown at the next board meet is performing the identical move as the reader who bought the Lex to match the BigSky: signaling refinement through gear positions, mine allegedly authentic, theirs allegedly decoration. Contrarianism about consensus is not an exit from the taste economy. It is a competing storefront.
The Lex-versus-Ventilator argument, half the price and first, also strips a real purchase down past what buyers actually buy. Matching power requirements, one supplier's presets and support line, a footprint designed alongside your other three boxes, resale within a known ecosystem. Interior decoration, the essay sneers, but a board is a system, and paying inside one ecosystem to keep the system coherent is exactly the reasoning the essay would defend if the ecosystem were a vintage Fender amp and its correct speakers.
Then the Morning Glory, and the house divides against itself in public. This masthead's JHS list crowns it the transparent OD answer, first slot, best column. This essay calls it a Bluesbreaker clone with a fashion problem and names two competitors that do it better. I have no interest in resolving the contradiction, because the contradiction is the honest finding: two sets of trained ears at one publication, opposite verdicts, same pedal. Every overrated list, including this one, is one writer's Tuesday, and the fashion problem is wearing whoever holds the pen.
Some pedals do get more credit than they earn. But the deliberately unkind list format earns credit the same way the pedals did, by being quotable in the right rooms, and this magazine should invoice itself at the same rate it invoices the era.
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